Just like Off-Peak before it, I'm so impressed by how much this game pulls art into the experience of playing the game. It confronts the player directly and unavoidably with the fact that all the architecture in the game, all the models and paintings, were made by a person with artistic intent. This is of course the case in all games, but Cosmo D's games foreground that fact, and they always leave me with a deeper appreciation of the latent art in other games when I play them afterwards.

This also has a pretty strong story, short and sweet but still filled with twists, turns, and shocking reveals. Because of this, it holds together as a singular work a bit more than Off-Peak does. This definitely makes me want to finish out the series, and explore the creator's other works as well.

A reoccuring narrative device in the Off-Peak series is this notion that your character is a spy, a serious political agent on a covert mission in an otherwise absurd world.

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Tales From Off-Peak City (vol 1) marks a point where the series starts to nail down some defining aspects that make up Off-Peaks unique personality and atmosphere.

One of those things Ive described as “clown politics”, serious and complex political interests framed by a world that is bizarre and humorous. Something highly typical of Off-Peak City might be a pair of tenants discussing composting strategies while one of them cradles a comically sized basketball meant for playing comically sized games on the sloping, sinking streets of their neighborhood.

Ostensibly, Cosmo D’s favorite narrative device that allows the player to inject themselves right in the middle of these absurd scenarios, is that of casting the player as someone tasked with a secret mission. The player is dropped off somewhere, given a set of spoofed documents, and asked to infiltrate the location to perform a clandestine task, a task like…. steal a saxophone from a legendary musician that now runs a pizza shop.

Why? Well, if only you had the full picture buddy. Things are brewing in the city of Off-Peak. Maybe youll catch a glimpse behind the curtain….

It is this ambience of conspiracy that adds a sense of gravity to a world where “the Circus” is a calculated philanthropic entity trying to subvert the schemes of ridiculous-sounding corporate interests. Every silly thing takes on a duality - yes, youre serving pizza with slices of “synthetic brain” and “flamingo meat” and bundles of “gummy worms” that are apparently real worms, but everyone around you treats it as real and nuanced.

What happens is: you start to treat it as real too. Caetano trusts me, I gotta make these pizzas - but Ive been given a serious mission to steal his saxophone, my benefactors need it for something important. Big Mo is hot on my trail, and the Human Resource Horizon factory looms large over the intersection of June and Yam St. Something is going on here.

A saxophone is a fitting instrument to focus on, cuz the tone that starts to emerge is like a jazzy surreal-noir, a manic sense of intrigue where the game lays out its absurd rules and parameters and you find yourself buying into it. And I think the secret is Trust - the game is baffling but its trusting you with this sensitive mission that carries with it a feeling of impact.

The bizarre trusts you, and in return, on impulse, you feel like you can trust the bizarre.

The last in Cosmo D's trilogy of first-person adventure games, Tales From Off-Peak City Vol. 1 continues to refine and expand Off-Peak's world, its interest in working class life, and a commitment to always having one foot planted in a bucket of tomato sauce while the other dangles over an abyss. The introduction of a rudimentary economy, opportunities for player creativity (a pizza maker AND a camera mode?!), and a more directed narrative make it the most structurally interesting of the three games, even if the diminishing of character interactions makes the world feel a bit barren (not necessarily a bad thing tonally, but less to my tastes).

The way TFOPC uses jump cuts and scene staging is leaps ahead of so many of its contemporaries. Incredible to play a game that understands physical comedy, juxtaposition, and when not to call attention to itself.

If you've never played a Cosmo D game before, Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1 has you navigating a surreal world, interacting with strange characters, and hearing cool music like the two previous games from the developer.

What sets this game apart is its scope. Whereas Off-Peak and The Norwood Suite are each set in one location; a train station and a hotel respectively, Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1 takes place in a whole neighborhood where you discover a rich culture of weirdness that's being slowly but surely hollowed out through corporate machinations enforced by wealthy property owners, both of the intellectual and real kinds. That narrative is a through-line across all three games, but it's explored more thoroughly here with its bigger cast and more varied environments.

It echoes the deft transitions from unpredictable absurdity to warm humanity to low-key menace in its character writing and atmosphere setting that Cosmo D's older works achieve, only that it all rings a little louder this time. You can tell the yearning and the struggle of residents trying to get by amid the increasing gentrification of their home, whether it's through art, play, or good work and a bit of everything with the main pizza-making mechanic, and you'll be very much onboard with the plan to strike back at the powers-that-be.

Confiante pra um caralho em tudo que faz - a primeira impressão é magnética e não quis parar em momento algum. Queria que tivesse sido menos linear, mas entendo os problemas de escopo, e fico feliz que o jogo faz o que pode pra criar a ilusão de que não é. A apresenteção é a estrela aqui: não sei onde começa a trilha sonora e onde começa o design de áudio, e é tudo impecável; não para só no som: o senso estético desse jogo é verdadeiramente de outro mundo; até os modelos horrorosos tem seu charme, tudo vibrando libidinosamente com a música, dos jeitos mais certos e errados. Estou vendidasso em tudo que essa galera produzir daqui pra frente.

Cosmo D: is simply a master of video game scenery. It reconfigures the aesthetic sense of visual collage through the architecture itself, leaving the seams that hold any video game level exposed, from textures and models to the Skybox, all mixed, with experimentation and without shame or desire to be impressive, pure architecture. digital surreal.

Nothing of coherent proportions or conventional spatial sense, something that, on the other hand, is quite common in the medium, much as contemporary AAA video games and their cinematographic and photorealistic ambitions want to deny. An observation room with a window to another room, with windows that show a landscape built like an old photograph. Representation of psyche and desire, also of memories.

- The pizza at the level of art, and the human activity of creating it at the level of any articulation and artistic practice, the result? At the delivery of each pizza, a semi-criticism between one or several characters of the piece created, with their counterpoints and their infulas written through small dialogues that float in the air of places sunk in music, full of sculptures, records, books and instruments that generate the sensation of being "bricks" to complete spaces rather than artifacts with an aesthetic and communicative function. A space so consumed by capitalism that there is no real aesthetic scale on practically anything.

100% new millennium Volatile and changing like our cultural and social dynamics.